


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by Kaleidoscopic_phan



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, References to Depression, Sad Draco Malfoy, Sad Harry Potter, Unsafe Sex Practices, a tenuous relationship at best with commas, sad boys not talking about their feelings, sweaters and letters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:21:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24324988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaleidoscopic_phan/pseuds/Kaleidoscopic_phan
Summary: There is nothing of Draco’s in the room: just a heavy air of sadness and the stink of exhaustion. It sits heavy on Draco’s bones, this lethargy, burrowing and hiding until it's at the heart of him, pulling at his magic, cracking at his core.
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 7
Kudos: 85





	Between the Shadow and the Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently I can't write a happy story to save my life. 
> 
> Title and quotes taken from various Pablo Neruda poems.
> 
> A special thanks to my lovely beta [@vanearte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanearte/pseuds/vanearte) who listened to me whine about this fic far later in the night than was comfortable and corrected my inability to stick to one verb tense with a firm hand. All other mistakes are entirely my own. 
> 
> And of course, thank you for reading!

Harry is a shadow on the bedside table, two scratches down Draco’s left side, a curly black hair in the weave of the comforter. 

There is nothing of Draco’s in the room: just a heavy air of sadness and the stink of exhaustion. It sits heavy on Draco’s bones, this lethargy, burrowing and hiding until it's at the heart of him, pulling at his magic, cracking at his core. He stares at the wall. 

The Ministry provided lodgings are not new, or nice, no trace of luxury of wealth along the walls, in the floorboards, in the smell of fresh flowers in the vases. It only smells of sawdust and mildew and the quiet defeat that comes with time. The small light at the corner of the room struggles valiantly to light the room, succeeding only in lighting a small corner of the writing desk, and edge of the dresser, and leaving the rest of the room in the dark. 

His last letter from his mother sits on the writing desk next to a healing potion and the bottle of lube. His mother’s letter contained nothing but half-truths and pretty details- the new azaleas in the garden, the joy she was finding in learning how to mend her own clothes (It’s so wonderful, Draco, to learn to do things for one’s self, don’t you think?), the plot of her latest novel. Never anything about the bottles of port rapidly going from the Malfoy cellar, or the harsh magic flowing from the floo entrances or the prickling burning red that wraps around his family’s ankles - a glowing brand tying them all to each other, red and dripping like a blood sacrifice. 

When Harry fucks him, he doesn’t look at his ankle or his mark. He turns him around on the bed, face pressed into the dusty pillows. “Fuck fuck fuck” he whispers. He never says his name. “Yes” long and drawn out before he spills inside Draco, wet and dirty and quick. 

Draco wonders if it's funny, that him - the fallen angel (Heir to the Malfoy Fortune gone Dark? Young Deatheater joins the ranks) is this chosen receptacle. That he is the one that holds this secret part of the Chosen One so deep inside of him. When Harry leaves, because he always does, quietly and cloaked always in his shrouded invisibility, Draco holds it inside him. Pretends that at least has some value. But even that leaks out onto the bed sheets, leaving Draco aching and empty and alone. 

Once, Draco had sobbed when Harry thrust in, a litany of nogoodnogoodnogood chanting in his head. Harry had dropped his head to Draco’s spine whispered a quiet “fuck” and continued fucking him. Draco silenced his sobs into the pillow until he felt Harry spill inside him.

A different time, earlier in this bastardization of a relationship they were pursuing- the Savior and the demon of the wizarding world reduced to flesh slapping in a dirty bedroom above the Leaky Cauldron- Harry had gone too fast. Draco hadn’t been able to say the proper spells in time, and he’d bled. He could feel the wetness spreading down his cheeks, dripping onto Harry’s cock- wrong wrong wrong. But he hadn’t stopped Harry and in the dark, Harry hadn’t seen. When he pulled out he made a sound like he’d been punched before touching Draco’s bleeding rim with gentle fingers. Then he left. The next day, there was healing cream but no Harry. 

Draco would have preferred the latter. But Harry came back, waltzed right through the wards on his door - meant to keep him in more than any wizard out. And there had been a few- angry wizards who’d lost families and friends looking for a target to place their blame. Crucio he found always tasted bitter at the back of the throat, no matter who was casting, but when his houseguests hit him it came with a painful churning in his gut too. Like his guilt just needed the spell to make itself physical, to manifest inside of him like a rotten festering thing and eat him alive. It was better with the cream. In case his nighttime visitors were not satisfied with him wreathing on the floor, wanted to see blood instead. And he gave it to them too, his veins welling up with his offering, this meek reparation for sins he didn’t want to commit. 

Some nights when Harry snuck into his room from whatever press conference or charity gala they had called him to, on the nights when the moon was too bright through his thin curtains to keep the room in shadow, Harry would run his hands along the scars that crossed Draco’s back. He would trace each one with icy fingers, drawing goose pimples along Draco’s skin. He never said anything, and Draco never moved, just held himself perfectly still while Harry touched him. Like a person comforting a frightened animal or an artist admiring their work.

Draco couldn’t tell. He clung to the anger he could sometimes see in the hard glint of Harry’s eyes as he crept into the bed, or the tense set of his shoulders, the bruising grip on his hips. This was his repayment, a service wrought to cover a debt he told himself. Told himself he didn’t feel the phantom imprints of cold fingers on his back, the lasting burn of a stretch from between his legs. And when he woke from the nightmares, sweaty and crying in the aching darkness of his bedroom, soothing himself with the memory of the hair on Harry’s legs brushing against the back of Draco’s thighs, or the soothing weight of a head dropped to the small of his back while they both caught their breath- when that happened, Draco shoved it away, put it in the box with all the other things he enjoyed that he was no longer allowed to have. And when Harry walked into his room, he let him, and neither of them said anything about the state of Draco’s hair or his skin or the rapidly emptying healing cream on the writing desk.  
There was a new one on his bedside table in the morning. 

Harry comes into his bedroom like he always does, soundlessly and distant. He walks to the end of the bed and shucks off his clothes- formal robes falling in a heap at Draco’s bedside like so many dreams. The black fabric shimmers slightly, charmed to draw attention and Draco for a moment wishes that the moon was out tonight- that he could see Harry as he steps out of his trousers, clinical and businesslike. But he can’t stand seeing Harry’s eyes can’t stomach the idea of those eyes on his body, watching quietly as they fit together, so Draco discards the thought. 

He sheds his shirt, worn down from wear and yellowing now at the cuffs, not that Harry could see it in the dim light of the bedroom anyway. They had only let Draco take one trunk here, and he was never very good at cleaning spells so his shirts always came out itchy and frayed. He steps out of his grey trousers, the last good pants he owns and then he is standing naked, his bare feet on the cold wood floor. He can feel Harry watching him, his eyes burning like coals through the near black of the room. Draco is cut open. 

The dark knot of feeling wells up in Draco, pity and hate and a burning love searing their way through him so fast his knees feel weak. He gets on the bed. Crawls on his hands and knees into the center, presents his arse to the figure standing stock still at the other end of the mattress. It’s easier when he can’t see him, when he can’t imagine the things he can’t have- the little dreams that made him a nuisance, a schoolyard bully in fifth year, the ones that got him through sixth. Little lies he used to tell himself to get through the day. 

Here it’s too real, Harry’s eyes too intense, and so he goes onto his knees on the mattress, grabs the pillow with his hands, and waits. 

This at least seems to snap Harry out of his daze and he too crawls onto the mattress. Under their combined weights the springs creak in warning or approval, compressing beyond what they can take- a constant brimming tension, the threat of them breaking at any moment. Draco can empathize. 

Then he can feel Harry’s cold hands sliding up his thighs. There’s the warm gust of Harry’s breath as he murmurs the spells, no wand in sight just the raw power he has brimming inside of him. Harry always says the spells, since the first time with the healing cream. Never once forgotten them, always the same whispered breath like he’s afraid to break the mausoleum silence of the room too, like the oppressive weight of the windowsill and the small dresser smother him too. Draco feels the tingle of the cleaning spell, and then Harry’s finger is there checking before suddenly Harry is there in one go, practiced and blunt straight to the core of him. 

Draco lets out a soft sigh, more a release of breath than anything- a huff to remind someone (Harry? himself?) that he too still breathes, still feels, still exists here in this room with the dusty comforter and the warped writing desk. Harry begins to move, deep full thrusts that scrape Draco raw despite the lube he feels squelching between his thighs.

Draco smothers his next sounds in the pillow, focusing only on the soft thump of skin against skin and the smell of them in his room. Thinking maybe it will seep into his mattress, trickle into his skin and Draco will have something to wrap around himself, a reminder that is more than just a tub of medical salve and a stray hair he can’t bring himself to vanish. 

Harry lets out a soft sign, knocks his chin against Draco’s shoulder, speeds up his pace. If he can feel the hitch in Draco’s breathing he doesn’t comment on it, doesn’t wrap his hand around Draco’s thin frame to grab him in that icy grip, soothe that hot aching pressure that hangs between Draco’s legs. 

He’d done it once, early into their arrangement, had slipped his hand under their bucking form and closed his palm against Draco’s cock. Draco had simply spread his legs, bowed his back slightly, forced Harry to readjust, to plant his hands on the mattress to keep from bucking out of him. He hadn’t done it again. It's better, Draco tells himself- he’s too close to the surface, too loud, too needy when Harry’s touching him like that, like he could hold all of him in his hands. Like he could carry that weight. Like he could want to. It's much better to have Harry’s hands on his hips, farther away from his heart, and the heavy weight of Harry inside him. Where he can pretend that he doesn’t feel him in the very deepest parts of him, that the ache Draco feels when he leaves is just the burn of the stretch, the gaping feeling of emptiness purely physical. 

Now in his bed, with Harry behind him, Draco doesn’t think of anything at all. Just feels the blunt pressure moving, pressing him into the bed, dark and tight where a little voice whispers safe safe safe. Harry moves his hands. Drags them, cold fingertips against Draco’s overheated skin and Draco thinks that they will go on his shoulders. He can deal with them at his shoulders, nothing more than anchors to pull against, the chilled fingertips purely utilitarian in their touch. 

But Harry’s hands don’t go to Draco’s shoulders, they creep around his ribs, one rubbing soothing circles against his side the other wrapping around his body, resting, firmly like it is not afraid of what it will find there, like it cannot feel the dark angry presence that lives there now, against his heart. 

“No.” Draco croaks out against the silence of the room. He can’t pull away from this, but he tries, tries to slide out from the too much that is pressing in all around him. Harry stills. His hand stops its circles but the other, that other creature (for surely it isn’t Harry who controls it, the golden child would not touch something so rotten, not voluntarily) that creature stays tight against his chest, braced against the angry maw of darkness locked away below the thin layers of skin and the painful thump-thumping of Draco’s heart. “No” he says again, a whisper.

“Draco,” Harry says. He drops his head to Draco’s shoulder blades, smudges a brand there for surely no kiss would burn like that, igniting the nerves there, where Draco’s skin used to be a dead thing clinging to a dying frame. 

“Get out,” Draco says, instead of roiling mass of things that clamber up his throat, spill out of his chest, leaking onto his already messy sheets.

“Draco please” Harry repeats, lips pressed against his skin, burning, burning, burning.

“Get out” he says again, stronger, flips himself out from under Harry’s body and curls up at the edge of the bed. He pulls a pillow over him, his nakedness too glaring to him in the dark, and steadily ignores the aching between his legs, his ribs, his eyes. 

“Draco, lo-” Harry tries again. Always trying, stupid gryffindor, going again and again and again until something breaks. Draco should have known he would be the thing to break, did know, is breaking, now on the corner of his Ministry owned bed in a room so filled with silence he could drown in it. 

“Get out!” Draco screams, something anything to fill up the silence that’s eating at him, anything to change the way Harry’s eyes are looking at him- obsidian carved smooth, warm. His voice breaks at the end and Draco feels it in his chest, the rattle of words pressing against his windpipe. “Get out” he manages, on the exhale of a sob, the tight hitch of his chest crushing Draco under its weight. 

Harry goes. He stumbles off the bed, somehow still so beautiful in his graceless plummet to the floor, his quick grab for his close. When he fastens his trousers, Draco can hear the zip of the fly like a shot. He opens the door, and for a moment the light of the hallway shows the dark tussle of Harry’s hair, the glint of his glasses, the slump of shoulders barely covered by his rumpled robe. Harry pauses at the door, but he doesn’t look back. And when the door falls shut, quiet like the rest of the room, and the wards click into place, wrong feeling somehow now that there’s only one person under them. When all of that happens Draco stares at his wall and he cries.

*** 

The next morning, when Draco wakes up the invisibility cloak is sitting on his writing desk. He doesn’t know what to do with it, so he folds it neatly and tucks it into one of the empty drawers of the dresser. His eyes are aching and puffy and he tells himself that he can’t see properly, that it’s just the regular cloak Harry left here. Though Draco knows that Harry left in his cloak last night, and he knows that the cloak looked nothing like this one- looked as though it felt like thick velvet, like it was charmed to be soft and warming, not like this one that feels like water given form, that threatens to drown Draco in his own bleeding lungs. 

That afternoon he does what he hasn’t dared do in his entire tenure in this room, he adjusts the wards. Tells himself it's better this way, that Harry got too close, and it’s easier to just live in silence, whole body stuffed full of cotton and weeping with it. 

The moon is out that night, and Harry does not come by. Draco tells himself he wasn’t waiting for him to, forget the wards and the cloak and the dent in the mattress where Harry’s knees usually go. Draco tucks himself into his mussed blankets, resolutely does not sniff at them to find a trace, any trace of there having been another person here, in his space, in his chest, wrapping around him. In the night, Draco dreams of doors closing. 

The next morning, Draco wakes to a knocking on his door. He pads over, opens the door, thinking it was good that Harry had replaced the tub of healing salve before he left, though usually they did not come so early in the day, wondering if he had any bandages left or if he’d need to rip up another shirt this time. But when he opens the door, there is no wizard at his doorstep, wand out reeking of desperation and loss, only a small tray with breakfast on it. It’s far nicer than the slop he is normally served for breakfast, in a chipped bowl porridge running down the sides. He takes the tray into his room. Sets it on the desk in the same spot where the cloak was the day prior. In another life the symmetry would have amused him. 

Now, he just sets down the tray and blinks at its contents. There arranged neatly on the tray is Draco’s favorite breakfast- two poached eggs, melon, what looked to be (and judging by the accuracy of the rest of the meal likely was) a lemon scone, tea made with the right amount of milk, toast, and on the very edge of the tray, rolled into the corner, a snitch. 

Draco stares, both at the breakfast and the golden ball sitting placidly in the light filtering through his window. He walks to the tray again, picks up the snitch and deposits it in the dresser. He feels something fall from beneath the snitch and flutter to his feet. He bends, picks that up too and tucks it into the drawer as well. He doesn’t read it, doesn’t run his fingers along the paper to feel the print of familiar chicken scratch dug into the parchment, certainly doesn’t bring it to his nose to try and find that elusive scent. He simply puts it into the dresser and goes to eat his breakfast. 

And if the taste of lemon scone makes something shuddery and longing break away from Draco’s chest and tear through his body, well he puts that into the dresser as well. 

Draco goes about his day and doesn’t take down his wards and doesn’t read the note burning a hole through the old wood of the dresser and he doesn’t kneel on his bed and shove his face into the pillows and imagine just for a moment cold fingertips and warm breath. No, he writes a letter to his mother, on the far side of the writing desk far from the breakfast tray and the shadow of a cloak and the hum of a letter. No matter that the desk is scarcely as wide as Draco’s hips, no matter that the parchment hangs off the chipped edge and every other line his writing, his immaculate if shaking script, becomes rough and tilted. This side of the desk gets better light. 

Draco falls asleep with his curtains spelled shut. He doesn’t check to see if the moon is out. 

The next morning, there is no knocking and there is no cloak. Draco is not disappointed, this is better. And if his chest feels like it's being wrought in two, and he can feel himself pouring through the cracks in his ribcage, coming apart like the scars covering his body are blueprints for where he’ll peel apart, then he can call it retribution for crimes committed as a child. A final payment for his sold innocence.

At eight, a paper slips under his door, charms itself across the room and folds itself neatly on the desk right above the shadow of the cloak and the imprint of the snitch. It says Draco on the front and Draco ignores it. Takes it to his dresser and tucks it next to his other things- spares a brief moment thinking that there is now more in the dresser than there ever had been and none of it is his. He turned the light on because he could stand the darkness even less than he could stand the looming morphing shadows, and Draco would not open the curtains to check for sure that the light pushing at the thin fabric was the moon. 

At nine, another note flies in, folds itself down on the desk and flutters contentedly. On it Draco, I’m sorry in painfully familiar penmanship. So his mysterious writer- and Draco refused to think who it was, refused to name him in the crackling silence that had become his mind- had figured out that Draco was not reading them. Draco tucked the card above the others but left the dresser open. He watches the shadows pool in the drawer, wind around the cloak, curl comfortingly around the snitch, soft and gentle like if Draco curled himself down and crawled into this drawer filled with things from the boy he would not name even in the privacy of his own head, if Draco curled himself tight, and slipped into the drawer like the shadow then the dark would be kind to him. Would not chafe and rub like it was doing, bruising him from corners, from the shadow of his pillow and the dark lingering along the walls of the room. 

At nine fifteen another note flits under his door, loops itself twice in the air before depositing itself on the desk. Please, it says. Draco’s breath hitches. He puts it in the drawer then sits on his bed, rubs his chest to coax the feeling of splitting in two away. To draw blood to the bruise he feels forming down his breastplate throbbing with every scrap of parchment that floats under his carefully constructed wards.

Draco crawls into bed, rests his face just to the left of where it normally goes and doesn’t think about why. 

When he wakes up, there is a pile of notes fluttering happily on his desk, crowding his letter to his mother off the side of the warped wood. They will not fit in the dresser so Draco leaves them there on the desk, soaking up the light from the window like they had their own lumos, bright and rustling and impossible to ignore. 

Draco walks to his door, decides breakfast will solve the burning hole in his gut, his chest. He opens the door, old wood that should creak but instead slides open silently, the hinges watching him through tired joints. His knees ache in sympathy. 

And there in the hall, washed in the soft light of the early morning, sun kissed and so so beautiful, Harry Potter slumped against his doorframe. One hand wrapped around a sheet of parchment, his wand resting against his denim. He hurt to look at like this, so soft and bright, rumpled like the pillow in the middle of Draco’s bed he still hadn’t moved.

“Harry” is punched out of him, dragged like Veritaseum from his lips- the only truth worth speaking. Harry blinks away, his eyes groggy but so so green, spring growth or a killing curse, Draco couldn’t tell. They stared at each other for a moment, Draco sure some magic, some magnet somewhere was pulling him, grabbing his eyes and forcing them on this too bright patch of sunlight in the filthy hallway.

Too much, too much, too much. Draco escaped behind his door, still no noise in this hallway in his room, just the empty gaping absence of sound and the echo of his voice, shattering. He slumped down on the other side of his door, an unconscious mirror of Harry on the other side, named now in Draco’s head, his presence sliding like those notes under his door, breaking quietly into Draco’s mind, his heart.

There’s a thud on the other side of the door, the drop of a forehead to the small space between his shoulder blades made wooden, echoing.

“Draco,” a whisper, a prayer. And Draco feels it, like a summons in his chest, the cracking broken thing crawling its way out of his ribcage. He opens the door. 

Haloed by the morning light, he’s standing there sleep rumpled and droopy. His eyes are bright, always so bright, staring at Draco right into that painful place in his chest, silver promise and green green life. “Draco,” the promise of a sigh. Almost no noise at all. 

Draco shudders, the black thing in his chest fighting its way out of the cage of his lungs. He manages a “hello” startlingly loud in the crisp silence of the hall, echoing in the deep quiet of his room.

“Hi,” is the reply, bold and loud. Draco feels the vibrations in his ribs, in his lips, in that little place between his shoulder blades. Then he is moving, pushing past Draco’s wards and shoving him into the wall. Their foreheads knock, and Draco is draped in warmth but for the cold fingers tickling his neck, sinking through the frayed fabric of his shirt at his hip.

“ Hi,” again, this time breathing against Draco’s lips, that comforting shadow from the dresser come to life wrapping itself around him like so many cloaks on the ground. Then Harry’s lips are on his, soft and bitten and warm warm warm. 

And Draco is shattering, cast apart in a million directions, all the pieces of him adrift around this brilliant creature in his room, so bright against the oppressive darkness of his room. And Draco lets himself go, feels the tangle of tongue against his flicker of particles, the wet salty tang of tears on his molecules. 

“Harry” he breathes like a promise. Somewhere, the universe rearranges itself, the shadows that haunt the corners of his bedroom pick up and go home, the small light in the corner calls victory over the writing desk, the curtain gets unstuck, lets in the light of the morning sun. The moon is still in the morning sky, like a tattoo, a scar, a reminder. 

It doesn’t matter, there is only this soft darkness of Harry and the warm tingle of his lips and the cold press of his fingers warming against his side. That mean thing in his chest settles, soothed by the closeness of something so like itself, no longer looking for its missing pieces. 

***

Later, much later, in a different bedroom with better lights and a door that creaks when Harry opens it, when Harry is laying on his side of the bed, hair mussed and tucked onto his pillows, Draco pads over to the closet. He’s looking for a jumper, something to cover the scars which the moon still makes too apparent on his pale skin. The shivers from where Harry traced them, reverent, are still there on Draco’s body, and he is cold. 

He goes to grab one of the fuzzy red ones, the large H an itchy reminder of ownership on Draco’s chest, and the smell of baking and hearth and brilliant fiery love. As he’s pulling down the jumper- this one is green, from a different Christmas, he sees it, a crumble of parchment imprinted with messy scrawl.

_And if eternity is the time I must wait, then I will wait eternity._

Draco tugs the note from where it was tucked, finds a shoebox behind some ratty t shirts, watches the contents spill onto the floor. 

_Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly  
when I am sad and feel you are far away?_  


Draco feels the hot tears prickle at his eyes, a reminder of a dark bedroom with silent hinges and an empty bed, two tubs of healing cream. The snitch falls to the ground too, glinting gently in the light of the closet. Draco swallows, slips on the jumper, puts the letters back in their box, reminders or declarations of a love Draco does not know yet how to swallow. He pockets the snitch and walks back to his, to their bed. 

His face, when he reaches up to feel it, is wet dripping under the weight of his feelings, and on his lips the cracking breaking feeling of a smile forcing its way through the staunch muscles. He lets it, lets the gentle wave of adoration and amazement soak its way into his bones, infuse his legs, his arms. And when his arms find a warm body with icy fingers on the left side of the bed, he is still smiling and he murmurs, “Harry,” and crawls back under their covers.

*** 

**Author's Note:**

> Again my apologies for the hurt I've caused. I promise one of these days I'll write a nice fluffy story about our boys and like a crup or something, but that day is not today. 
> 
> If you liked it please leave a kudos or a comment, your kind words make my day! And as always, any constructive criticism is much appreciated.


End file.
